{"id":1638,"date":"2017-12-28T11:04:55","date_gmt":"2017-12-28T11:04:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/designing-a-training-with-participatory-and-co-creative-process\/"},"modified":"2024-01-11T06:26:22","modified_gmt":"2024-01-11T06:26:22","slug":"designing-a-training-with-participatory-and-co-creative-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/designing-a-training-with-participatory-and-co-creative-process\/","title":{"rendered":"Designing a Training with Participatory and Co-Creative Process"},"content":{"rendered":"
In my use of human-centered design (HCD) at Digital Green, I found that the inspiration and ideation phase in HCD as being completely intertwined. They can’t really be separated into two neatly divided phases. While we were trying to find a solution to the question \u2018How\u00a0can we enable field level workers to operate equipment confidently?\u2019 – the processes we followed seemed to make no sense initially. In my\u00a0previous blog, I had mentioned that it was the \u2018messiness\u2019 of the process that I really started enjoying, once I stopped being so\u00a0hung up about \u2018being systematic\u2019. In that,\u00a0what I both enjoyed and learnt the most was the freedom to follow your intuition and develop your own versions of methods, activities and processes.<\/p>\n
While we used several of the conventional methods, such as interviews and secondary research, we also designed and conducted activities with users that we felt would get us closer to our design principles, and the solution. They could largely be bunched under 2 categories:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Under the above two categories, we conducted several activities, some of which used \u2018co-creation\u2019. I am using the term co-creation to define a process in which the end user creates at least some part of the prototype. It is a concept, not a tool or a method. Several methods can use the concept of co-creation. It could be a role-play that the users develop along with the designer, or a script for which they provide dialogues.<\/p>\n
Participatory Video techniques and Co-creation <\/strong><\/p>\n Of the different methods, I focus on participatory video here. Working with any participatory process, including video production, teaches you to learn from those who are at the center of the issue.\u00a0Participatory video production is supposed to be driven by communities to communicate what they want to, and in a manner that they want. In co-creation models, though the user community is involved in the creation of a prototype\/solution, they are usually not the ones driving it. Further, they communicate what the designer wants them to communicate. To make it more tangible, through\u00a0participatory videos a community could have made a video about any issue they cared about. But as part of co-creation, we, the designers, asked them to make a video story specifically about equipment operation. The agenda was driven by us, not them.<\/p>\n Our team combined these two seemingly similar, but actually different concepts. We created several prototypes for different solutions that can together improve the training. The possible solutions included a training video, an illustrative handout and a team game that also works as a skill assessment. Initially, we thought that an obvious prototype of a video would be a role-play or a script. But then\u00a0we thought \u2013 we have all the equipment and experience to make a video quickly. So, when prototyping, we used participatory video techniques for co-creation of a video. We asked the field level workers to develop the content for the video, which\u00a0would show their peers how the equipment works. When they discussed the story with us, they had:<\/p>\n We shot the prototype video with them, edited it the same evening and tested it the next day in a meeting of field level workers. Interestingly, most of the feedback that we got was related to the audio and light quality. Pretty much everything else worked. We made some\u00a0basic changes, developed another version and tested that too, to come to a version – one both the users and\u00a0us were happy with. We used the same process for two other training videos, where users even shot the video (though they did not edit it), and both times the results were the same. Very clearly, the users were the best creators, at least in this case.<\/p>\n We acted just as facilitators, and the users were creating the whole framework. It definitely helped that I knew participatory video techniques well, and it was easy for me to facilitate the process of story development and shooting.<\/p>\n The final training video that we shot was not participatory. Professional filmmakers, who were not related to the context at all took the script and shot the video with professional actors. This was done\u00a0primarily to ensure \u2018quality\u2019\u00a0since that was the major drawback of the prototype video that we created. However, it was still \u2018co-created\u2019. After all, the script, though modified to some extent, was developed by the users.<\/p>\n The use of these different methods for research and prototyping gave us some strong design principles that kept us in good stead as we made several training videos over the course of 2 years. You can watch the training videos that we made on pico operation, documentation and video production here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Do you know of designers who\u2019ve used participatory techniques and\/or processes in their design research? Have you used it yourself? I would definitely be interested to know more about your experiences in bringing together participatory videos and HCD together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The final blog of a 3 part series from our Head of Training about Human Centered Design process that informs our work at Digital Green.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1019,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reflections"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1638"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2505,"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1638\/revisions\/2505"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n